Greek blocks

The Splendid Sampler is winding down with just 14 blocks to go. Bonnie Hunter’s mystery quilt is fast and furious, running only through sometime in January typically. I’m finishing up the last 2 blocks for Leah Day’s quilt-as-you-go. I learn a lot from these large groups so when Amy Ellis started a group to make a sampler quilt from her latest book, I jumped on board.

Last month we made the larger of 2 cross blocks. This month are large Greek cross blocks.I spent a lot more time picking out fabrics than I did making these which was really nice this time of year.

I had originally planned to use only Kaffe Fassett fabrics that I have for this but my stash for this is all 10″ squares so that didn’t work for these blocks. I had these on hand already along with a few others so I went back to Amy’s layout and decided the bolder of the 2 fabrics needed to be in the cross and not in the corners. As an added bonus, I had AccuQuilt dies for this so the cutting went really fast!

I also got the “runway lights” added to my Avante today. There are 2 USB ports on it – who knew! It plugs in which hopefully means the lights last a while.

The machine quilting project is a lot smaller quilt than I realized when I signed up for it. It’s quilt-as-you-go so I still need to connect the blocks together. I am leaning toward adding at least a 5″ border around it just to make it larger and I may add 2 or 3 borders and then quilt the rest of it once I have all the blocks connected.

Since this literally is just a practice quilt and not a gift for anyone, I decided to use the last couple of blocks for longarm quilt practice with the rulers. I completely skipped past her quilt design (sorry Leah!) and tried out circles, curves, waves and straight lines. I’m about 75% done with this block. It’s nice to have no guilt about mistakes since I gave my permission to get them all out of the way on this quilt!

I definitely understand that; I have 3 quilting friends with the same dilemma. I did see a vast improvement when I went from trying to quilt on a sewing machine to the sit-down Sweet Sixteen which fortunately doesn’t take up a lot of space but still….space is space.